Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974

Intelligence in Recent Public Literature

CIA’s
operation to attempt to affect a national election in Chile in 1970 and its consequences
have engendered more persistent controversy, and more polemic and scholarship,
than any of the more than one dozen covert actions with which the Agency has
acknowledged involvement. Although some cost more and lasted longer (Tibet,
Laos), entailed intervening in the domestic affairs of European allies (France,
Italy), had greater long-term geopolitical impact (Iran, Afghanistan 1979–87),
or were more acutely embarrassing in their execution and outcome (the Bay of
Pigs), CIA’s presidentially mandated effort to prevent Salvadore Allende de
Gossens from becoming the first elected socialist president of a Western
Hemispheric nation soon cast a shadow on the Agency’s reputation that lingers
nearly four decades later. A few years ago, then-Secretary of State Colin
Powell spoke for many critics of US policy toward Chile when he said “It is not a
part of American history that we’re proud of.”[i]

This stigma on
CIA has endured largely because of the interplay of ideological romanticism,
political disillusionment, and institutional energy on the part of detractors
of the anti-Allende covert action, who have dominated the historiography on the
subject. According to Peter Kornbluh, director of the Chile declassification project at
the National Security Archive,

The Via Chilena—peaceful road to socialist
reform—captured the imagination of progressive forces around the globe…. The
sharp contrast between the peaceful nature of Allende’s program for change, and
the violent coup that left him dead and Chile’s long-standing democratic
institutions destroyed, truly shocked the world…. In the United States, Chile
joined Vietnam on the front
line of the national conflict over the corruption of American values in the
making and exercise of US
foreign policy.[ii]

There it has
remained, principally because of to the efforts of a community of human rights
activists, left-wing scholars and intellectuals, and antisecrecy advocates that
emerged in the early 1970s while the Cold War consensus inside the United States
was fracturing. The members of this subculture—the boundaries between them are
often porous—are dedicated to uncovering evidence about the police-state
tactics of Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who succeeded Allende after a military
coup in 1973, and to seeking justice for the victims of his often brutal
17-year dictatorship. The National Security Archive, for example, is up front
about its motive for aggressively using the Freedom of Information Act and
civil lawsuits to extract thousands of pages of documents from CIA and other US
government agencies to “force more of the still-buried record into the public
domain—providing evidence for future judicial and historical accountability.”[iii]

The Chilean
operation galvanized CIA’s congressional critics at the same time. In 1973, a
Senate subcommittee on multinational corporations, led by Sen. Frank Church,
investigated contacts between the Agency and the International Telephone and
Telegraph Company, a prime target for nationalization under Allende. It was the
first public hearing ever held on covert action and resulted in a critical
report that provided the first official account of one aspect of the coup. Two
years later, Church’s select investigatory committee conducted more public
hearings and produced another (unfavorable) survey of CIA’s operations in Chile.[iv]

Then in 1976,
Chilean intelligence operatives murdered Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando
Letelier, and an associate in Washington,
DC. To Pinochet’s opponents, that
brazen action demonstrated the bankruptcy of US
policy toward Chile
that CIA had helped implement. How could the United States support a regime so
ruthless that it would commit terrorism in its largest patron’s capital? More
than ever in the minds of writers on this subject, the Agency became identified
with the regime’s origins and hence charged with some responsibility for its
actions, including the deaths or “disappearances” of thousands of people in
Chile and, through the notorious Condor program, in other Latin American
countries.[v] The notion that CIA was at least partly to
blame for whatever happened after its failed attempt to keep Allende out of
power became a leitmotif of most historical treatments of US intelligence
activities in the region.

The Reagan
administration—partly because of the influence of UN Ambassador Jeanne
Kirkpatrick’s arguments about the reformability of authoritarian states—took a
more benign view of the Pinochet regime and further inspired its critics to
seek a full accounting of Agency involvement in Chile. They received a huge
boon from the Clinton administration, which,
having already authorized sizable releases of secret material on Central America and under pressure from Congress and the
anti-Pinochet lobby, undertook the Chile Declassification Project that
eventually yielded around 24,000 never-before-seen documents from CIA, the
White House and National Security Council, the Defense and State Departments,
and the FBI.[vi] In response to a congressional requirement in
the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1999, CIA issued a white paper in
September 2000 entitled CIA Activities in Chile.[vii] The report concluded that the
Agency was not involved in Allende’s death during the 1973 coup, that it
supported the military junta afterward but did not help Pinochet assume the
presidency, and that it reported information about human rights abuses and
admonished its Chilean assets against such behavior according to the guidance
in effect at the time.

That scarcely
settled the matter. The issue of US-Chilean relations and the legacy of CIA’s
intervention stayed prominent during the next several years through a
succession of events that included the Chilean government’s efforts to get
Pinochet (then living in Europe) extradited and put on trial; the uncovering of
his secret multi-million-dollar accounts in a Washington, DC, bank; a Chilean
legislature investigation of CIA’s role in the coup; huge lawsuits filed by
Chilean citizens against Henry Kissinger (national security adviser and later
secretary of state during 1969-77) and the US government for damages in
connection with deaths and human rights abuses by the Pinochet regime; and a
contretemps over Kissinger allegedly pressuring the Council on Foreign
Relations to squelch a CFR fellow who wrote a favorable review of Kornbluh’s
book The Pinochet File in Foreign Affairs.[viii]

Pinochet’s
death in December 2006 brought no closure to the long debate over CIA
intervention in Chile
and its legacy. The discussion essentially remains polarized between left and
right,[ix] and for some time an objective narrative of
the facts and a fair-minded analysis of the critical and apologetic
perspectives have been sorely missed. Such is the landmark contribution of
Kristian Gustafson’s Hostile Intent: U.S.
Covert Operations in Chile,
1964–1974, which must be considered the indispensable study in the large
bibliography on that seemingly intractable subject. A former student of
Professor Christopher Andrew’s at Cambridge
University and now a lecturer at Brunel University
in England,
Gustafson previewed some of his findings in this journal in 2003.[x] In Hostile Intent,he
demonstrates in an orderly and comprehensive way, with a good grasp of Chilean
politics and full facility with the now substantial documentary record, how US
administrations carried out their Chilean policy founded on the concern stated
as early as 1958 by the senior State Department official responsible for Latin
America that “were Allende to win we would be faced with a pro-Soviet,
anti-U.S. administration in one of the most important countries in the hemisphere.”[xi]

One of the
strengths of Gustafson’s book is that in the course of recounting the
often-told story of how Washington
tried to prevent that from happening, he takes on prevailing misconceptions and
provides details that add meaning to familiar material.

Instead of reflexively supporting the right wing as it had elsewhere in
Latin America during the latter 1960s and well into 1970, Washington
had CIA channel assistance to an increasingly marginalized group of centrists
at a time when Chilean politics was growing more polarized—a development that US
analysts missed.

Notwithstanding recurrent rhetoric about Chile
being a cornerstone of US
policy in the region, White House oversight of covert action planning was
strikingly haphazard, and CIA and the State Department went about their
business operating under inconsistent premises, sometimes supporting the same
parties and politicians, sometimes not, for different reasons.

Besides State having previously opposed intervening in the 1970 election,
another important reason why Richard Nixon kept the US ambassador, Edward M.
Korry, out of the loop on the coup plotting in September and October 1970 (also
known as Track II) was that he distrusted Korry’s politics. The ambassador was
a Kennedy Democrat and supporter of Chilean politicians who had benefited from
the Kennedy administration’s Alliance
for Progress.

Despite Kissinger’s ominous admonition to Nixon in November 1970 that
“your decision as to what to do about it [Allende’s election] may be the most
historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this
year,” and the enunciation by the National Security Council of a “publicly cool
and correct posture toward Chile,”[xii] the administration’s guidance on both covert
and overt activities was slow and erratic during the next two years even as the
Allende government fell deeper into economic and political trouble and became
increasingly unstable.

After the September 1973 coup that
ousted Allende—in which CIA had no role and about which it knew little
beforehand—Washington let the Agency continue supporting the center-left
Christian Democratic Party, and the Agency’s head of Latin American operations
argued against the cutoff that went into effect at the end of the year. He and
other CIA officers contended that the subsidy was needed to counter the left if
the junta relinquished power and to “maintain our capability for influencing
the junta and molding public opinion” if it did not.[xiii]

Gustafson’s
study makes a crucial point about covert action that policymakers and
intelligence practitioners would do well to learn: for political operations to
succeed, they must have time to work and must be coordinated with the overt
aspects of policy and all elements of the country team. Those conditions
existed in the 1960s, and the Agency helped accomplish Washington’s
objective of keeping Chile
in what it perceived as safe, center-right hands. In contrast, throughout most
of 1970 “the United States
was perpetually one move behind the political evolutions in Santiago.”[xiv] By the time the Nixon administration suddenly
took notice of events in Chile
after the first round of elections in September and then went into panic mode,
CIA had few resources and less time to stem the tide moving in the socialists’
favor. Nixon and Kissinger ordered it to undertake a back-channel coup plot
that failed disastrously and assured Allende’s victory. As Gustafson concludes:

Rather than
operating on their own, covert actions in 1964 were used to bolster overt plans
such as the Alliance
for Progress. Thus they acted as a force multiplier for U.S. foreign policy goals. In
October 1970, covert action was separated from any strategic thinking and uselessly
sent charging into the brick wall of immovable Chilean public opinion.[xv]

Thus another
lesson from the Chilean covert action is that political operations will most
likely work when they reinforce trends and do not try to create them or shift
them in other directions.

Hostile
Intent is marred
by some minor errors of style and fact. Occasionally Gustafson’s prose takes on
a slightly turgid, dissertationesque quality; he misuses some words
(disinterested for uninterested, reticent for reluctant); credits Rep. Otis
Pike with the “rogue elephant” charge instead of Senator Church; mentions the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence several years before it was created;
overlooks the fact that the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act superseded the 1974
Hughes-Ryan Amendment’s requirements for reporting covert actions to Congress;
and misidentifies the State Department official in the first photograph of the
insert section. More substantively, Gustafson uses material acquired from the
KGB archives in the early 1990s in a way that suggests it was available to US
officials at the time. But these small problems should not distract readers
from realizing Gustafson’s achievement after entering such a politically and
emotionally charged environment. If it is true, as Kornbluh claims, that “after
so many years, Chile remains
the ultimate case study of morality—the lack of it—in the making of US foreign
policy,”[xvi] then a scholarly and dispassionate contribution
to the literature such as Hostile Intent is all the more to be valued.

Footnotes

[ii]Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A
Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003), xiii, xiv.

[iii]Kornbluh, National
Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 8, “Chile
and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup,
September 11, 1973,” on National Security
Archive Web site at <http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm>.

[iv]L. Britt Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA’s
Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004 (Washington, DC: CIA Center for the
Study of Intelligence, 2008), 271–73; US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, 93rd Congress, 1st
Session, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company and Chile,
1970–1971 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973); Hearings
before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress,
1st Session, Volume 7, Covert Action (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1976).

[v]On Condor—a Pinochet-initiated collaboration with
neighboring governments’ intelligence services to quell radical subversion
throughout the region, often through violent means and occasionally abroad—see
John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism
to Three Continents (New York:
The New Press, 2004).

[ix]At the other end of the spectrum from Kornbluh’s Pinochet
File are Mark Falcoff, Modern Chile, 1970–1989: A Critical History
(London: Transaction Publishers, 1989) and idem, “Kissinger & Chile: The
Myth That Will Not Die,” Commentary 116:4 (Nov. 2003): 41–49.

[x]“CIA Machinations in Chile
in 1970,” Studies in Intelligence 47 no. 3 (2002): 35–49. The article
received the Walter L. Pforzheimer Award given for the best undergraduate or
graduate paper on an intelligence-related subject submitted to Studies
during 2002.

[xi]Roy Richard Rubottum, assistant secretary of state
for inter-American affairs, quoted in Hostile Intent on page 19. Prof.
Andrew (with Vasily Mitrokhin) has described the KGB’s relationship with
Allende and its involvement in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s in The World
Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York:
Basic Books, 2005), 69–88.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this article are those of the author. Nothing in the article should be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of an article’s factual statements and interpretations.

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